The musical instrument digital interface (MIDI), which is an international standard, is used for digital transmission of performance data of electronic musical instruments between the instruments.
In Unexamined Japanese Patent Application kokai Publication No. H11-175062, an electronic musical instrument is described that has a function for inserting a meta-event defined as an edit point instruction event with respect to a position set as an edit point in a song data item created using the MIDI standard. An array of event information is formed so as to obtain appropriate performance results when a data interval formed using the edit point as the base point is reproduced. The editing device side is configured to perform distinguishing of the edit point on the basis of the edit point instruction event, linking of data by use of data intervals delineated by the edit point, or the like, and music performance information is edited.
Without limitation to the electronic musical instrument described in Unexamined Japanese Patent Application Kokai Publication No. H11-175062, when editing is performed using an electronic musical instrument, in the case in which the size of the event included in the song data item is a fixed length, forward or backward searching can be performed by repositioning the address by fixed length-size portions. However, in the case in which the data size of the event has a variable length, the size information is embedded in the data item itself, and forward or backward searching can be done by repositioning the address by a size portion indicated by the size information. When the size information is embedded in the song data item itself, although the song data item including the event size of variable length can be treated, the size of the song data item itself increases, and thus adoption of this method is difficult when memory is restricted. Moreover, since the electronic musical instrument described in Unexamined Japanese Patent Application Kokai Publication No. H11-175062 requires the including of data indicating the edit point in the song data item, the adoption of this method is difficult when memory is restricted.
According to an aspect of the present disclosure, an event data item of variable size included in each of a plurality of song data items can be edited while suppressing data size of each of the plurality of song data items.